Progress, Inconvenience, and Other Unnatural Disasters

The good folk who frequent the USA Parkway, a stretch of road that until recently enjoyed the freedom of being open in both directions, have been informed this liberty shall remain curtailed till June 27.

As one might expect, it was not a decision made by the weary travelers who must endure but the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT), which announced that a lane closure would commence Thursday.

The afflicted stretch lies just past the Storey County line, about three miles south of Google, though one suspects that Google, with its impressive mastery of things, knew about it before anyone else.

Storey County officials, presumably with a mix of regret and bureaucratic inevitability, relayed the news to the public, noting that businesses coming from the south to the industrial center might experience some degree of inconvenience, which, in government-speak, usually translates to “prepare for suffering.”

In a development entirely unrelated—except in the way that thunder is unrelated to lightning—Alphabet Inc.’s Google has announced a hearty $9.5 billion investment in U.S. offices and data centers this year, a sum that ought to buy a respectable number of cubicles, coffee machines, and motivational posters. Storey County, Nevada, is among the chosen recipients of this largesse, along with Nebraska and Virginia, two places that, like Nevada, seem to have the geographical good fortune of being large and mostly empty.

Having spent the past few years allowing its workforce to toil in their pajamas, Google has now decided that three days of office attendance per week is an essential component of civilization. Naturally, it has met the enthusiasm usually reserved for tax audits and dental surgery.

Whether employees will accept their return to the fluorescent-lit embrace of corporate life or take inspiration from their algorithms and re-route themselves to a more accommodating existence remains to be seen. Meanwhile, motorists using USA Parkway should prepare for the long, slow crawl of progress—or at least the long, slow crawl of traffic.